


Silence

by GarcysFlereal



Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: Angst, Drama, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-01
Updated: 2018-05-01
Packaged: 2019-04-30 15:13:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,274
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14499780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GarcysFlereal/pseuds/GarcysFlereal
Summary: What happened after Lucy and Garcia watched It Happened One Night.





	Silence

He wants to look at her, to make sure that she is all right. They have been sitting here in silence ever since he sat down and offered her a cold beer.  She took it from him without a word, he wanted to say something to her, to help her feel better, and his fingers twitched as he told himself to just “be” with her, that his presence itself was enough to comfort her.

He knew this about her.

He knows almost everything about her. He has read her journal more times than he can count. The first time he began reading it he thought it was just a fancy notebook filled with historical notations, but as he continued reading it, personal entries were mixed in. Her private thoughts about her mother, her sister who had disappeared, her feelings about Wyatt and their one-night fling, Rittenhouse, how history was supposed to be compared to what had been changed. She sounded crazy in this journal, but the more he read and re-read it the more he found himself falling in love with her words, falling in love with her mind.

So Garcia stares at the television screen ahead of him. _It Happened One Night_ is playing, he has seen this movie a few times when he was younger, living in Eastern Europe with his mother. He was never one for romantic comedies though. No, that is not true, he enjoys watching romantic comedies with the woman he loves. The sound of a woman’s laugh ignites laughter from him. He knows it is too much to hope for laughter from Lucy tonight. He knows she is not paying attention to the movie. Her heart is broken. He forces himself to focus on the television.

_“Oh, you’re such a smart alec. Nobody knows anything but you. I’ll stop a car, and I won’t use my thumb.”_

_“What’re you going to do?”_

_“A system all my own.”_

Though he has no recollection of the timeline in which Jessica Logan had been murdered. He read about it in Lucy’s journal. It pains him to have this intimate knowledge of Lucy’s life and not be able to warn her, nor share it with her. When she came to him in 2015 she told him explicitly not to interfere with the things he will read, not to give her warning because everything that she goes through, she goes through for a reason, to bring her to him. According to her journal, he, Garcia Flynn, is the most important person in her life. The only one she can trust. The love of her life.

He used to refuse to accept this as truth. He wanted to reject any feelings he could develop for Lucy. Yes, the Lucy who gave him the journal knew him intimately, and entries in her journal talked of their relationship with each other in the future, but back in 2015 all he wanted was to do what ever he could to save his wife and daughter. So he read the journal, and strategized how he would be able to infiltrate Mason Industries in order to steal the time machine and go back and stop Rittenhouse, and save his girls. He should have known it would not have been so easy. Lucy even warned him that she and her team would get in his way.

Time has passed. It has now been four years since Lorena and Iris were murdered. He cannot give up hope that one day he will be able to save his girls, but it is becoming more and more difficult to hang onto that belief. He has no proper photographs of them, no family photos, all he has are fading newspaper clippings of their pictures from articles written about their murder. He has already forgotten the sound of Lorena’s voice, and the smell of his daughter’s hair after she had bathed. He has accepted this and knows that he is moving on. He will always love them. They will always hold a special place in his heart, but he knows that Lorena would want him to find happiness without her.

And should one day he return from a mission and they are alive and well. He is a man of his word. He would go home to them, Iris would jump up into his arms, and he would hug his wife, then he would say goodbye to them and walk away forever. And if by some blessing from God he and Lucy were together he would return to her. He would not ever put her through what she is going through with Wyatt again. When he falls in love he falls hard, and fully commits his heart and soul to the one he loves, and he is in love with Lucy. Call it fate, but he tried so hard not to fall in love with Lucy and it happened anyway. He raises his eyes upward, as if asking Lorena -in Heaven- for forgiveness, subconsciously rubbing a finger over his wedding ring.

As if feeling his heart aching and tears stinging his eyes, Lucy moves next to him, and feels her arm rest against his, and her head rests on his shoulder. He wonders if she feels his pain just as clearly as he feels hers. On some level does she know that her presence offers him comfort too? If only he could wrap his arm around her shoulders, pull her closer to him. He knows that they can offer each other more comfort than just this comfortable silence. He shifts his body to lower himself in the chair, making himself more comfortable as the two of them listen to the dialog playing out on the screen before them.

_“Have you ever been in love, Peter?”_

_“Me?”_

_“Yes. Haven’t you ever thought about it at all? Seems to me you could make some girl wonderfully happy.”_

_“Sure, I’ve thought about it. Who hasn’t? If I could ever meet the right sort of girl. Yeah… where are you going to find her? Somebody that’s real. Somebody that’s alive. They don’t come that way anymore. Have I ever thought about it? I’ve even been sucker enough to make plans…”_

Clark Gable goes into a long monologue about seeing a beautiful island in the Pacific and wanting to find a girl who would enjoy jumping into the surf with him and loving it as much as he did. Garcia looks down at Lucy, her eyes are closed now. He has worried for her. Just yesterday they got back from Salem, just yesterday he had patched up her arm. Just yesterday she had thought she and Wyatt were a couple, and now -once again- her world has shattered around her. She feels that she has lost everything. Yet… she has him and does not even know it (yet).

She will always have him. He would sacrifice anything for her and do anything to make her happy. He looks at her, trying to figure out if she has fallen asleep. He cannot tell, so he continues watching the movie. Forty minutes later it ends, and he looks down at her, and reaches over and touches her shoulder and lightly shakes her.

“Lucy…?” He whispers, but she does not respond.

He closes his eyes and nods his head to himself. He is not surprised that she fell asleep. He quietly removes her empty beer bottle from her lap and leans forward to set it on the table next to his. Then he carefully wraps his left arm under her shoulders, and his right arm underneath her knees, and stands up, carrying her in his arms, making sure that her head rests against his shoulder. He carries her down the hallway toward hers and Jiya’s bunk. Jiya and Rufus are asleep when he enters, so he takes extra care to be quiet so not to wake them.

Garcia carefully places Lucy into her bed, and quietly removes her shoes, and pulls the blanket up over her body, tucking her in. He sits at the side of her bed and watches her for a few seconds. Every fiber in his body wants to bend down and place a kiss on her forehead and whisper to her “volim te, moja ljubav,” one of the few phrases in Croatian that Lucy will one day come to understand. Instead, he gently brushes a strand of hair from her cheek, tucking it behind her ear.

His heart aches knowing that she is hurting, knowing that one day she will fall in love with him, and will remember how to smile and how to laugh, how to be happy again. He wishes he could be with her now, but she needs time. Time to rediscover herself, to reignite any confidence she has lost in herself after this situation with Wyatt and Jessica, and she needs to allow herself a moment to just talk to Wyatt, get the air cleared between them so that she can finally move on.

Garcia loves her too much to want to rush her. He admires her for being so independent, for being a strong woman, for being a woman that does not need a man to define who she is. She does not need a “knight in shining armor,” she needs an equal. She needs someone who can challenge her intellectually.  He is her equal. He can challenge her intellectually. In her journal she wrote those things were reason why she fell in love with him in the first place. Garcia smiles remembering how she also wrote that his kind heart, and friendship were the first things that attracted him to her.

He closes his eyes and takes in a deep breath, letting it out in a long and heavy sigh. He rests his hand gently on her shoulder and gives her a little squeeze then stands up and leaves, heading to his own bunk.

Considering how industrial the bunker is, it is actually rather quiet at night, just a quiet hum of the fan motors can be heard in the hallway. He goes back to the common area, and turns off the TV, and picks up their empty beer bottles and throws them away. He takes a moment to wet a dishrag and wipe off the counters in the kitchen area. He turns off the lights, and heads down the hall and checks that the exit is securely locked.

Everyone in this bunker may not like him, nor trust him, and that does not bother him, but he still feels protective of them, especially of Lucy. Rittenhouse is not getting into this bunker on his watch. Sure, Agent Christopher has guards outside this bunker day and night, but he does not trust them. Rittenhouse is changing history, at any time one of these guards very well could turn out to be some undercover Rittenhouse agent.

At least this last mission Christopher let him have a gun (which he used to save the teenage JFK), of course she took it away once he got back, so if anyone broke in here to harm them, he would have to resort to hand-to-hand combat. Thankfully, this bunker used to be a top-secret facility for the military elite and has plenty of workout equipment. He will hit those in the morning. And maybe once everyone starts trusting him he will pitch the idea of helping them learn some self-defense. He may be a big and strong man, but there is only so much he can do to protect them on his own.

The exit door is secure, for the moment he can breathe easily.

He walks slowly down the hallway toward his bunk. Luckily for him, there are enough rooms in the bunker so he could have his own room. Not that Wyatt, Rufus, or Connor would want to room with him, and vice versa. He is used to being alone. After Rittenhouse murdered Lorena and Iris, he withdrew from life. He had to. Rittenhouse framed him for his family’s murder. He had to lie low, take jobs that paid “under the table,” and pay for an apartment with cash only. He was a wanted man.

He enters his bunk and digs into the duffel bag of items that Agent Christopher was able to retrieve from his apartment after his arrest. He pulls out a well-worn hardcover book, _Illinois Rail Splitter_ by Lucy Preston. He flips through its pages which he has underlined and his handwritten notes in the margins, the page catches on a newspaper clipping of a photo which he had tucked away in the book. He sits down on the edge of his bed and stares at it for a few minutes. There is both hope and sadness in his eyes.

He hears a loud moan coming from elsewhere in the bunker, and he is glad that Lucy is asleep, he wouldn’t want her hearing Wyatt and Jessica re-consummating their marriage. Does that boy have an inkling of understanding about how Lucy feels? Does he know how inconsiderate he is being toward her feelings? He hopes to God that Lucy is still asleep and not hearing this.

Garcia tucks the photo back into the book, and closes it, setting it on the table next to his bed. He bends over and unties his shoes and gets himself ready for bed.

\---

She wakes in a cold sweat, shivering in the damp night air of the bunker. Lucy reaches over and grabs her wounded arm. It still hurts, and it did not help that she tried to help Wyatt when he was fighting Emma at the hospital yesterday. She knows that she should not have gone with Wyatt to look for John Kennedy. She only offered to go because she thought she would be one-on-one with him, but he agreed to let Jessica tag along. She was sure that he could tell that she wanted time alone with him to talk about what is going on, but he did not get that. He did not understand her. Suddenly Jessica is back and Wyatt is clueless.

She was so thankful that Flynn sat with her tonight, in silence, and did not prod her to talk about her feelings. Jiya had encouraged her to do that, as had Denise, and she knows they want her to talk because they want to help her, but that is not what Lucy Preston does. Rufus has basically ignored the situation since they got back from Salem, and Mason, well… Mason. Opening up about feelings is one of the hardest things for Lucy to do, and she has never felt close enough to anyone to just talk things out. In her family, you do not talk, you write things down.

She wonders about her journal, the blank one that her mother gave to her. Did Rittenhouse want her to write in that journal? Flynn got it from her so that must mean that she writes it eventually. He returned the journal to her (did he want her to read it too? If yes, why?) and he was about to tell her how exactly he got her journal (“take it from me, you age surprisingly well”) when Agent Christopher showed up with her team and arrested him over a month ago.  

That angered her so much. She and Flynn had developed a rapport by that point. He trusted her, and she trusted him. To see him so angry with her for something Christopher did upset her so much. She truly wanted Flynn to have a chance to go back and save his wife and daughter, she knew that once he did that he would return and he would destroy the Mothership, and everything would end. Their lives could move on.

And she was supposed to be go back to save Amy.

She closes her eyes, and forces tears away. She is surrounded by friends here in the bunker, yet she feels so alone. No one understands her. Wyatt does not consider her feelings. No one knows how to comfort her… except Garcia Flynn. Suddenly she is overcome by the desire to be near him again. He will never know just how grateful she is to him for just sitting with her, in complete silence, and not judging her or joking with her for resting her head on his shoulder.

It suddenly dawns on her that he must have carried her to bed. Her mouth opens slightly in shock, she would never think that Flynn would be the kind of man who… her thoughts trail off as she knows better than to think that about him, of course he is the kind of man to take care of the people he cares about, and she has known for a long time that she is special to him. She is not sure in what way she is special to him, just that she is. The pain of longing pierces her heart, making it swell with appreciation for him. He may act like a jerk in front of everyone else, but really, he is one of the sweetest men she has ever met. She smiles to herself thinking about how he might react should she ever tell him this fact. He would probably try to conceal a shy smile, lower his head, and look up into her eyes from his own lowered eyes.

She wonders if he is still awake.

She wanders out into the hallway, first stopping by the kitchen area to grab a drink of water. Again, she smiles, seeing that he took the time to tidy up the place. An act that will be unnoticed by the others in the morning, but does not go unnoticed by her because, after all, he is one of the sweetest men she has known. It touches her that he has a domestic side (which he will no doubt conceal from the rest of the team).

She walks down the hallway and pauses, her eyes falling on the exit door, she double checks that it is locked. The people in this bunker are all she has left. She has lost everyone else in her life (her sister, her mother, Wyatt) and does not want to risk losing everyone else should Rittenhouse enter the bunker in the middle of the night. It is locked.

She tip-toes down the hallway, heading to Flynn’s bunk. She quietly knocks on the door, but there is no answer, so she carefully opens the door and peeks in. She sees him lying in his bed, covered with a blanket.

“Flynn…?” She whispers to see if he is awake.

There is no response.

For a moment she considers crawling into bed next to him even if that meant waking up to his sass in the morning (which quite honestly, he would not serve her, he respects her and likes her too much – she is very aware of this fact). Lucy turns around, and leaves his room, running her hand through her hair. She quietly shuts the door behind her and leans her back against it. No, she does not need a man to comfort her. She can get through this on her own.

She heads back toward the kitchen area and opens a cabinet door and retrieves an unopened bottle of vodka and heads back to her room, thankful that Jiya and Rufus are still fast asleep as she opens the bottle and takes a drink, replaces the cork, and places the bottle underneath her bed. She lies down and lets the warmth of the alcohol comfort her as she falls back asleep, alone.


End file.
